Barely a week goes by without the UK setting new standards in the renewables sector: electric cars are becoming affordable as well as desirable; and emerging technologies – from innovative generation products to artificial intelligence and the blockchain – are shifting the balance of power. At WIRED’s annual Energy conference in partnership with Centrica, co-founders and innovators who have pushed, prodded and broken boundaries on how we consume, distribute and generate power took to the Keynote Stage.

Some of the most exciting talks concentrated on new ways of generating energy. Inna Braverman, co-founder of Eco Wave Power, is proposing an alternative answer to the renewable reliability problem: fix a system of buoys and generators to existing marine structures – breakwaters, jetties and disused wartime ports – rather than tethering multi-million-pound edifices to the ocean floor. Then there’s Harvard professor Daniel Nocera, who has his eyes on the energy needs of six billion people. He has developed a product that can be distributed to those who don’t have reliable access to energy: his artificial leaf is an experimental technology that can turn water into hydrogen and oxygen using just sunlight and some catalysts. The resulting gases can be burned in a fuel cell to generate electricity.

Advertisement

There’s also the startups that are focusing their efforts on smarter, more affordable and efficient energy to the masses. Sandra Sassow, for instance, sees waste as fuel. Her startup, SEaB Energy, turns a neighbourhood or business into its own power plant with closed-loop systems known as the Flexibuster (for food waste) and the Muckbuster (for agricultural waste). The systems, which fit into a shipping container, generate electricity and heat that are sent to a microgrid to be shared between neighbours. Another is Graham Oakes, founder and chief scientist of Upside Energy, a company that helps people make smart choices about their energy use by using AI to orchestrate the energy stored in their devices. “We’re making better use of the infrastructure already there and letting intelligent devices map energy supply. So instead of predict and control, it’s monitor and respond,” he says. Bulb co-founder Hayden Wood, envisions the role of energy suppliers evolving into energy managers as storage provides significant cost reductions to energy. And Enass Abo-Hamed’s startup, H2GO Power, stores hydrogen gas that can be burned in fuel cells by using nanomaterials to create a flexible sponge that traps hydrogen atoms in its pores. When the structure is heated, gas is released.

Read next

WIRED Smarter 2018: Partners

Nina Bhatia. Managing Director, Centrica Connected Home

Leon Csernohlavek

[link url=“https://dmse.mit.edu/faculty/profile/chiang"]MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang[/link] recognises the cost of manufacturing can be a concern when it comes to storage – such as producing larger lithium-iron ore batteries that could be used to store power for a building or group of buildings in a neighbourhood. He has spent years working on novel battery designs; the latest, 24M, is a “semisolid” lithium-ion battery that he thinks could be ideal for grid-storage applications.

One firm hoping to leverage blockchain technology to help enable partnerships on the grid is Electron. “Blockchain is a useful technology when you have shared infrastructure – where companies need to share something or co-ordinate,” explains Joanna Hubbard, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer. One of its experiments, a collaboration with French energy giant EDF, has brought peer-to-peer electricity to a block of flats in London that contains solar panels, owned by the landlord, on the roof.

Advertisement

The products customers use to consume energy are also changing to reflect consumers’ changing priorities, one of which is flexibility. Managing director of Connected Home at Centrica Nina Bhatia told the Keynote Stage audience that functionality, ease of use and affordability are all things customers value when it comes to their products. “Consumers are different, we have to bear that in mind. For me it's not about changing behaviours – it's about giving them a choice to change their behaviours if that’s what they want to do,” she says. Using this kind of technology is leading to new innovations of distribution and regulation of energy. Speaking as part of the regulating disruption panel with Clive Maxwell, director general at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Energy and Adam Cooper policy and engagement director at the National Infrastructure Commission, Oxfam head of innovation Laura Edwards said: “we can imagine a decentralised world where people are able to buy from multiple suppliers at the same time,” something she says will likely have a big impact on how industry is regulated.

Renewables remain an area of huge investment. Chris Russell, managing director of Tonik, says the company aims to halve household energy bills by 2022. To do this they will accelerate the uptake of microgeneration, home-energy storage and electric vehicles. But first they need to understand consumer behaviours and what they want. “Without understanding what the data is, we are still operating blind. We want to provide people with this, without becoming a scientists overnight,” he says. Sonja Chirico Indrebø, vice president for strategy and innovation in new energy solutions at Statoil, says renewable energy is such a high priority as a growth area for the company, they are investing NOK 100 billion (£9bn) over the coming years.

Rob Doepel, partner head of energy UK and Ireland at EY, spoke about how the UK is preparing for the next big disruption in the energy sector. He says that while the UK has always been seen as an attractive source of investment for renewable energy, it shouldn’t become complacent. “The UK is seen as the bastion of reliable and affordable energy,” he says. “Now it's becoming more around clean energy as well and I would hate for us to lose all the incentive that created that.”

Curated by WIRED’s award-winning editorial team, WIRED Smarter will harness the strengths of its Retail, Energy, Money and Security summits to offer delegates a wider view of the disruption shaping today’s business world. The event takes place in London on October 9, 2018